Digital Nomad Trip Report: Panamá City

Quick Facts about Panama City for Digital Nomads

Introduction

Panama City wasn’t supposed to be a trip report at all.

I was flying down to Brazil from Ecuador and, as with almost every route in this part of the world, the flight went through Panama with Copa. Copa is Panama’s flag carrier and Tocumen is the self-styled “Hub of the Americas”, which means that if you’re moving around Latin America there’s a very good chance you’ll end up standing in that airport at some point wondering where the good coffee is.

Here’s the bit a lot of people don’t know: Copa lets you turn that connection into a proper stay at no extra cost. Instead of a two-hour layover you can break the journey and stay in Panama for up to fifteen days, then carry on to your final destination, and the ticket price stays exactly the same. So I did, and I gave it a week.

On paper Panama City is somewhere I’d probably not enjoy. It’s piping hot, it’s Americanised to the extreme and it’s a skyline city built around a canal and a banking sector rather than around people walking about. I went in with genuinely low expectations. And maybe that’s exactly why I came away pleasantly surprised, even if I was sweating buckets most days.

As regular readers of The Nest will know by now, my priorities for a nomad base are simple: walkability, decent cafés, reliable internet, somewhere green to move around and a vibe that doesn’t make me feel like I’m living in a co-working advert. Panama City as a whole fails a couple of those tests fairly badly, the traffic is genuinely horrendous and it is not a walkable city. But Casco Viejo, the old town, quietly passes every single one of them, and I barely left it.

Let’s dive in…

How to Travel to Panama City

Getting to Panama is the easy bit. Tocumen International (PTY) is one of the busiest airports in Latin America and the main hub for Copa, who fly to 80-odd destinations across the Americas. If you’re moving around the continent, you will pass through here eventually whether you plan to or not.

✈️ Fly to Tocumen (PTY) MOST CONVENIENT
Tocumen has direct connections to most of Latin America, several US gateways and a handful of European cities including Madrid, Amsterdam and Istanbul. Copa is the dominant carrier by a mile but you’ll also find Iberia, KLM, Turkish and the US majors. From the airport it’s about 30-45 minutes into the city by Uber, or longer if the traffic gods are unkind, which they usually are. Metro Line 2 also has a branch to the airport now, and at 50 cents a ride it’s an absolute steal, just note that it doesn’t drop you anywhere near Casco Viejo.

🛑 Use the Copa Stopover MY PICK
This is the one. If you’re flying Copa between two other countries and routing through Panama, you can add a Stopover and stay in Panama City for anywhere from 24 hours to 15 days without paying any more for the flight. It has to be added when you book, not afterwards, otherwise you’re into rebooking fees. You’ll pay Panama’s entry and exit taxes (roughly $50 all in, usually bundled into the ticket) and that’s it. It was extended from 7 to 15 days in June 2026, so it’s now a genuinely viable way to bolt a week or more in Panama onto a trip you were taking anyway.

🚌 Travel overland from Costa Rica BEST OVERLAND OPTION
If you’re coming down through Central America, Tica Bus and Expreso Panama run services from San José to Panama City. It’s a long day, figure on 15-16 hours including the border crossing at Paso Canoas, and you’ll want a printed onward ticket and proof of funds because land borders are where Panamanian immigration is at its most thorough. Coming the other way (from Colombia) there is no road. The Darién Gap is not a travel route, it’s a jungle, so it’s a flight or a boat and nothing else. If you’re coming from Colombia, I’d definitely research the sailing option through the San Blas islands.

🚘 Rent a car BEST FOR FLEXIBILITY
Useful if you’re heading out to Boquete, the beaches or El Valle de Antón. Genuinely pointless if you’re staying in the city. Panama City traffic is dreadful, parking in Casco Viejo is a nightmare of narrow one-way cobbled streets, and Uber is cheap and everywhere. Note also that tourists can only legally drive here for the first 90 days of a stay.

Can I work remotely from Panama City, Panama?

Panama is one of the more straightforward countries in the region for this. British citizens get 90 days visa-free on arrival, and citizens of the United States and Canada get a rather generous 180 days for reciprocity reasons. Most EU nationals, Australians and a long list of others sit in the 90-day bracket alongside us. If you’re looking to track your visas and stay allowances, try out my project Nomad Register, the first three trips are free.

A few things worth knowing before you land:

• Your passport needs at least six months of validity and a blank page.
• Immigration can ask for proof of onward travel and evidence of at least $1,000 in funds or a credit card. They rarely do at the airport, they very often do at the land border.
• Always check the stamp you’re given. Officers have discretion to grant fewer days than the maximum and it’s your problem, not theirs, if you don’t notice.

As ever, there’s nothing in the tourist rules that explicitly permits remote work, and nothing that explicitly forbids you answering emails from a café either. The usual grey area applies: your reason for being in the country is tourism, you just happen to be catching up on work while you’re here. What Panama has clamped down on is the “permanent tourist” who lives here on back-to-back stamps. Re-entry refusals have become noticeably more common, so if you want to stay long-term, get the right visa rather than bouncing to Costa Rica every three months.

How to extend your tourist visa in Panama

Yes, you can extend, but it’s not the tidy online process you get in other countries. Extensions are handled in person by the Servicio Nacional de Migración at their offices in Panama City, and you need to apply before your current stay expires. An expired stay can’t be extended, it can only be fined.

You’ll need your passport plus copies, passport photos, proof of funds, a return or onward ticket, proof of your address in Panama and a written letter explaining why you want longer. Fees are modest, but the queues are not, and plenty of people simply hand the whole thing to a local lawyer for a few hundred dollars rather than lose two mornings to it.

If you do overstay, the fine is $50 per month or part-month. The bigger risk is signing something you don’t understand at the airport on the way out, as a voluntary deportation order carries a multi-year ban. Don’t wing it.

Does Panama have a digital nomad visa?

It does, and it’s one of the better ones in the region if your income is on the higher side.

The official name is the Visa de Corta Estancia como Trabajador Remoto, or Short Stay Visa for Remote Workers, created by Executive Decree 198 back in May 2021. In practice everyone just calls it the digital nomad visa.

• Duration: 9 months, extendable once by another 9 months, so 18 months in total.
• Income: you must show foreign-sourced income of at least $36,000 a year (roughly $3,000 a month).
• Who it’s for: employees of a foreign company or self-employed people with foreign clients. You cannot provide services to the Panamanian market on this visa.
• Cost: the government side is around $250 to Migración plus $50 for the card. Lawyers typically charge $1,000-1,500 on top, and realistically you’ll want one.
• Timeline: budget one to two months for processing.

Requirements in short:

• Valid passport with at least six months’ validity, plus passport photos;
• Criminal record certificate from your country of origin or residence, apostilled;
• Health insurance valid in Panama for the whole period of the visa;
• A letter from your employer (or, if self-employed, from your own company plus client contracts) confirming that the work is performed for entities outside Panama;
• Bank statements evidencing the income threshold;
• A sworn affidavit that you will not take work in the Panamanian market;
• Government fees paid to the Servicio Nacional de Migración.

One genuinely attractive bit: Panama operates a territorial tax system, so foreign-sourced income isn’t taxed here. That said, once you’re spending more than 183 days a year in the country you’re into tax residency territory, and that’s a conversation for an accountant rather than a travel blog.

What are the best neighbourhoods in Panama City?

I’ll be honest with you here: I barely left Casco Viejo.

That’s not laziness, it’s a recommendation. Panama City is a sprawling, car-dependent city where a two-mile journey can eat forty minutes of your life, and the old town is the one part of it that works on foot. I ventured out to other neighbourhoods a few times, mostly chasing cafés, and each time I got back I was glad I’d based myself where I did.

For a short stay, stay in the old town. For anything longer than a couple of months I’d look elsewhere, because Casco is small and I suspect it would start to feel cramped and a bit samey once you’d done the loop for the fiftieth time.

Is Panama City safe for digital nomads?

Generally, yes, and Casco Viejo in particular is about as safe as anywhere I’ve stayed in Latin America. There’s a visible tourist police presence, the main plazas are busy until late and you’ll see people wandering around at night with their phones out, which is always my unofficial safety barometer.

But Panama City is a city of very sharp edges, and the old town sits right on one of them. My guide gave me the single best piece of advice I got all week: stick to the red-bricked roads. Casco’s restored streets are laid with red brick, and if you find yourself walking on plain tarmac you’ve drifted out of the restored zone and into somewhere you probably shouldn’t be. It sounds crude but it works, and it’s easy to remember after a couple of beers.

The contrast is genuinely stark. You’ll walk past an opulent restored colonial mansion with a rooftop cocktail bar on it, turn a corner, and one block later you’re looking at serious poverty. El Chorrillo and Santa Ana border the old town directly and you should not walk into them, day or night. It’s not a case of being nervous, it’s just that the line is sudden and unmarked and you can cross it without meaning to.

Practical advice:

• Stay inside the restored core and the Paseo Las Bóvedas seawall.
• Take an Uber home at night rather than walking, even if it’s only a few blocks. It’s $3.
• Petty theft is the main risk, as ever. Phone off the table, bag on your lap.
• The rest of the city is fine in the neighbourhoods you’d actually stay in, but it’s a city where you take taxis rather than wander.

Where to work remotely in Panama City

Full disclosure, I’ve gone off co-working spaces in recent months. They’re just not really my scene any more, and on a short stay I work exclusively from cafés and my apartment. Panama City has plenty of co-working if you want it, and I’ve listed a few below, but the cafés are where I actually spent my week.

I did explore outside the old town to see what the café scene was like elsewhere. It exists, and there are some good spots in San Francisco and El Cangrejo, but they genuinely paled in comparison to what’s sitting in a four-block radius in Casco. So here’s where I worked:

• Leto Hifi — Bills itself as a listening coffee bar and I’ve honestly never come across anything quite like it. There’s a turntable and a library of LPs, and you pick a record and put it on for your own and everyone else’s benefit. It’s a lovely, slightly ridiculous idea and it makes for a brilliant place to work, assuming you can be trusted not to spend forty minutes flicking through the racks instead of doing your job. Great coffee too.
• Geisha Terroir Specialty Coffee Shop — Right next door to Leto and my other regular. Loads of natural light, plenty of space to spread out and, as the name suggests, this is the place to get properly acquainted with geisha coffee (more on that below). Another really easy place to knock out a few hours.
• Sisu Coffee Studio — A block or two from Leto and the most laptop-friendly of the three. Great coffee, better cookies, loads of space and, crucially, actual power sockets. It’s run as an extension of one of Panama’s serious coffee estates, so the beans are exceptional.

A word on geisha coffee

If you only take one thing from this report, take this one. Geisha (or gesha) is a coffee variety that originally came from Ethiopia and kicked about the region for decades doing very little. Then in 2004 a farm in Boquete, in Panama’s western highlands, entered it into the Best of Panama competition and it completely broke the scoring. It tastes almost nothing like what most people think coffee tastes like: jasmine, bergamot, peach, more like a delicate tea than an espresso.

It has since become the most expensive coffee on earth. At the 2025 Best of Panama auction a lot from Hacienda La Esmeralda went for over $30,000 per kilo. You are not drinking that one. But you can sit in a café in Casco Viejo and drink a competition-grade Panamanian geisha as a pourover for somewhere between $8 and $20, which for the best coffee in the world is a genuine bargain and a very Panama thing to do. Just don’t order it with milk unless you enjoy watching a barista’s soul leave their body.

If you do want a co-working space

• The old Selina building on Calle 12 — Now trading under new ownership as part of the Viajero chain of hostels, this is actually where I stayed in a private room and I’d highly recommend it, this is the only real co-working option inside the old town. Day passes around $10 and a rooftop thrown in. Convenient more than brilliant.
• Panama Coworking Center — In the business district, popular with the startup crowd and reliably the fastest internet you’ll find in the city.
• The Cube — Out towards Vía España, around $15 a day or $60 a month, which is very good value if you’re staying a while.
• Spaces — If you want the polished international chain experience with meeting rooms and a receptionist, it’s here, at international prices.

Internet-wise you’ll be fine. Fibre is widespread in the city and most decent Airbnbs will get you 50mbps or better, but as always, ask the host for a screenshot of a speed test rather than trusting the listing.

Things to see & do in Panama City

Panama City isn’t a place you come to tick off a hundred sights. There are a handful of genuinely worthwhile things and a lot of very hot walking in between them, so plan around the heat and don’t try to cram it all into one day. Here’s what’s worth your time:

• 🚢 The Panama Canal at Miraflores
  The obvious one, and the one that needs managing expectations. Your ticket (around $17 for foreigners) gets you the museum floors, the observation deck and, best of all, a 45-minute IMAX documentary about the building of the canal narrated by Morgan Freeman. The film is excellent, properly interesting, and watching it on an IMAX screen is a treat in itself. The canal bit? I’ll be honest, underwhelming. You’re only looking at the original locks, which are much smaller than the new ones, and watching a ship inch through a lock is so slow it’s borderline hypnotic. Go for the documentary, go so you can say you’ve been, but go with low expectations. Check the transit schedule before you set off if you want to actually see a ship in the chamber.
• 🧬 Biomuseo
  This was the surprise of the trip and I’d rank it above the canal. It’s the only Frank Gehry building in Latin America, sitting at the start of the Amador Causeway in a riot of crumpled red, blue and yellow metal that looks like a paint factory has fallen over. Gehry’s wife is Panamanian, which is how it ended up here at all, and it opened in 2014. The subject is brilliant: the museum tells the story of how the Isthmus of Panama rose out of the sea about three million years ago, joined two continents, split one ocean into two and set off one of the biggest ecological reshuffles in the planet’s history. Eight galleries take you through it, and the standout is Panamarama, a ten-screen projection space that puts you in the middle of Panama’s ecosystems. It’s compact, you’ll do it in a couple of hours, and it’s $20 for non-residents. Do it in the morning and combine it with a walk or a cycle along the causeway.
• 🌳 Cerro Ancón (Ancon Hill)
  The big green lump you can see from most of the city, and the best view in Panama. It’s 199 metres high, it was part of the American-controlled Canal Zone until the Torrijos-Carter treaties handed it back, and the enormous Panamanian flag on the summit (roughly the size of a basketball court) was raised in 1977 as a sovereignty statement. It still flies day and night. The walk up is a paved road, about 30-40 minutes at a gentle pace, it’s free, and the gate opens at 8am (reports on this vary). From the top you get Casco Viejo and the old city on one side, the skyline and the Bay of Panama on the other, and the canal entrance beyond. It’s also a proper patch of tropical forest, so keep your eyes open for sloths, agoutis, toucans and Geoffroy’s tamarins. Go early. By 9am you’ll be cooking, the humidity is no joke.
• 🏛️ Panamá Viejo
  The original Panama City, founded in 1519 and the first permanent European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas. It was flattened in 1671 when the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan turned up and sacked it, and the survivors simply moved a few miles west and built what is now Casco Viejo. What’s left is a wide-open field of stone ruins with the cathedral bell tower still standing, plus a very good modern museum and visitor centre. It’s a fifteen-minute Uber east of the centre and it’s UNESCO-listed alongside the old town. Climb the tower for the view, and go early or late because there is precisely no shade.
• 🦥 Parque Natural Metropolitano
  Genuine tropical rainforest inside the city limits, which almost no other capital in the world can claim. There are seven short trails, the popular loop takes around 90 minutes, and there’s a lookout at Cerro Cedro where you’re standing in jungle looking straight at a wall of skyscrapers. Sloths, coatis, agoutis, tamarins and a ridiculous number of birds. It’s about $4 for foreigners, it opens at 7am and it closes at 4.30pm. Same advice as everywhere else here: early morning or don’t bother.
• 🚲 Amador Causeway
  A six-kilometre causeway built from the rock dug out of the canal, linking four small islands to the mainland. Rent a bike at the entrance, ride out to the end and look back at the skyline, with the Bridge of the Americas on one side and a queue of container ships waiting their turn at the canal on the other. There are restaurants all along it and the sea breeze makes it one of the few places in the city where you’re not immediately melting.
• 🍹 Rooftops in Casco Viejo
  Not a sight as such, but it’s what the old town does better than anywhere. Half the restored buildings have a bar on the roof, all of them look out over either the cathedral domes or the skyline across the bay, and working your way through them is a perfectly respectable way to spend an evening. Sunset lands somewhere between 6pm and 6.45pm all year this close to the equator, so plan accordingly.

Food & Drink in Panama City

Panamanian food doesn’t have the international profile of Peruvian or Mexican cooking and it isn’t trying to. It’s a crossroads cuisine: Spanish colonial, Afro-Caribbean, indigenous and, thanks to a century of canal traffic, a fair bit of everywhere else. It’s hearty, it’s fried more often than not, and it’s very good indeed when you find it done properly.

Local Cuisine

• Sancocho — The national dish. A clear, restorative chicken and ñame (yam) stew heavily perfumed with culantro, served with rice. It’s what Panamanians eat when they’re hungover and it’s exactly as good as that implies.
• Ceviche — Usually corvina (sea bass), cured in lime with red onion, culantro and chilli, and eaten with crackers rather than the sweet potato you’d get in Peru. Cheap, everywhere and excellent.
• Ropa vieja — Shredded beef slow-cooked in tomato and peppers, served with rice and plantain. Comfort food.
• Carimañolas & hojaldras — Breakfast, essentially. Carimañolas are deep-fried yuca fritters stuffed with beef or cheese; hojaldras are fried dough that will ruin your day in the best possible way.
• Patacones — Green plantain, smashed and fried twice. They come with everything.
• Seco Herrerano — The national spirit, a triple-distilled sugarcane liquor. Locals drink it as seco con leche, mixed with milk, which sounds appalling and is oddly delicious.

Mercado de Mariscos

Panama City’s fish market sits at the edge of Casco Viejo, right where the old town meets the water, and it’s the single best-value eating in the city. Downstairs is the working market where the boats land their catch each morning; outside and upstairs is a cluster of stalls and cheap restaurants serving ceviche by the cup for a couple of dollars and whole fried fish for not much more. Go around midday, order the corvina ceviche, eat it standing up, and don’t overthink it. It’s touristy now, but it’s touristy because it’s good.

🍽️ Best restaurants in Panama City

Same caveat as everywhere else in this report: I barely left the old town, so this list is unashamedly Casco-centric. There is a very serious restaurant scene out in San Francisco and Obarrio that I simply didn’t get to.

• Afrodisiaco Italian Modern Kitchen — No visit of mine is complete without finding the leading local Italian, and this is it. Gnocchi and an Aperol Spritz, every single time. Never lets me down and it didn’t here either.
• Kanibal — An amazing rooftop restaurant and probably my favourite meal of the week. Casco is absolutely packed with rooftops and this is the one I’d send you to first.
• Lazotea — Perfect for a late drink if, like me, you have absolutely no interest in clubbing. They’re open until 3am and serve food late, which in most cities is a miracle.
• Casa Casco — A huge old house with four completely different restaurants inside it and a cracking rooftop on top. Good for a group where nobody can agree on what they want to eat.

A note on tipping

Tipping culture in Panama is rife, and it caught me out more than once. Restaurants routinely add a 10% service charge to the bill and then leave the tip line blank underneath it, and card machines will often prompt you for more on top. Cafés have tip jars and tablet prompts in a way that feels imported wholesale from the United States, because it more or less is.

Ten percent is the norm for table service if it hasn’t already been added, and nothing is expected in a café beyond rounding up. Check the bill before you pay. It’s not a scam, it’s just that between the service charge, the prompt and the change you’ll happily hand over 25% without noticing if you’re not paying attention.

My favourite spot in Panama City

Leto Hifi, without much of a contest. A café where you get to be the DJ is a dangerous concept for anyone with a deadline, but it’s the most memorable place I’ve worked from in a long time and the coffee genuinely backs it up. Honourable mention to the Paseo Las Bóvedas seawall at the southern tip of Casco Viejo, where you can sit on the old Spanish fortifications with the entire skyline glittering across the bay in front of you. It’s free, it’s a five-minute walk from anywhere in the old town and it’s the best thing in the city.

When To Visit Panama City

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: it is hot. Panama City sits nine degrees north of the equator at sea level, and the temperature does essentially nothing all year. Highs sit between 31°C and 34°C every single month, lows never drop below about 22°C, and the humidity is relentless. I went in August, I was burnt to a crisp within days and I’ve never been so grateful for air conditioning in my life. If you don’t like heat (and I very much don’t) there is no month that fixes that. Plan your days around it instead: outdoor stuff before 9am, cafés and museums in the afternoon, rooftops in the evening.

What does change is the rain. Panama has a dry season and a wet season and they’re both quite committed to the bit.

Best Time to Visit Panama City
January to April is the dry season and it’s the clear winner. February is the driest month of the year by an enormous margin, with about 10mm of rain across five days, compared to 330mm in October. Skies are blue, the breeze off the Pacific takes a bit of the edge off the heat and everything outdoors is far more predictable. March and April creep up towards being the hottest months of the year, so February is arguably the sweet spot.

Other Times to Visit Panama City
May to November is the wet season, and October and November are the wettest months. It’s not usually all-day rain, it’s a heavy tropical downpour in the afternoon that clears as fast as it arrives, but it will scupper an afternoon plan or two. The upside is that everything is spectacularly green and the city is much quieter.

July and August get a partial reprieve locally known as the veranillo, a little summer within the wet season when the rain eases off for a few weeks. That’s when I visited, and it did rain, but nothing that a coffee and an hour indoors didn’t solve.

Climate by Month in Panama City

How to Keep Fit in Panama City

Better than you’d expect for a city this hot and this car-dependent, mainly because someone had the very good sense to build a waterfront path along the entire front of it.

Running in Panama City
The Cinta Costera is the headline. It’s a landscaped waterfront strip running along the Bay of Panama with wide paths, outdoor gym equipment and sports courts dotted along it, and end to end you’re looking at roughly 8km one way. The skyline views are ridiculous.

The bit I used most was Cinta Costera 3, the viaduct that loops out over the sea around the headland of Casco Viejo. It’s about 3km of dedicated cycle and running path hanging over the water, and if you’re staying in the old town it starts more or less on your doorstep. It’s a perfect out-and-back. The catch is that there is not one scrap of shade on it, so it gets absolutely toasty, and I’d strongly suggest going before 7am or after 5pm.

The best day to do it is Sunday, when they close the bypass road to traffic until midday and the whole city comes out. Runners, cyclists, skaters, families, kids on scooters, the lot. It’s a proper occasion and one of my favourite memories of the trip.

Other running options

• Amador Causeway — 5km each way out across the islands, flat as a pancake and with a sea breeze the Cinta doesn’t get.
• Parque Omar — In San Francisco, a 3.5km loop with a bit of rolling and, crucially, actual trees.
• Parque Natural Metropolitano — Up to 5km of forest trails if you want to run with sloths watching you. Hilly and humid, so don’t expect a PB.
• Cerro Ancón — 2km of steep paved climb. Brutal in this heat and a very effective workout.

Cycling in Panama City
Cycling as transport is not really on, the traffic is too aggressive and the drivers too creative. Cycling as recreation is great: the Cinta Costera and the Amador Causeway both have proper segregated paths, and there are independent bike rental stands at the causeway entrance charging a few dollars an hour. Sunday morning on the closed road is the best cycling in the city by a distance.

Gyms and everything else
The city is full of gyms. The big chains are Smart Fit and PowerClub, both with day and month passes at reasonable prices, and most modern apartment buildings have a decent gym in the basement, which is worth filtering for when you’re booking. Beyond that you’ll find plenty of yoga, CrossFit boxes, boxing gyms and, this being a coastal city, paddleboarding and sailing out of Amador. Swimming is the underrated option: a good number of Casco and Marbella buildings have rooftop pools, and on a 33°C afternoon that’s the only exercise anyone sensible is doing.